President Donald Trump said he “would love” to send homegrown and violent American criminals — “extreme cases” — to foreign prisons, most notably in El Salvador, if it were “permissible by law.”
Trump made the comments in an interview with Time magazine that was published Friday. Trump first floated the idea during an Oval Office press conference with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele earlier this month.
“I would love to do that if it were permissible by law. We’re looking into that. When I have a person, these would be extreme cases,” Trump told Time. “When I have a person that is a 28-time in-and-out person that goes out and tries to kill people every time he or she is out, I would have no problem with doing that whatsoever. We’re talking about career criminals that are horrible people that we house, and we have to take care of for 50 years, while they suffer because they killed people.”
Trump was asked what kind of American criminals he would consider shipping off to the Salvadoran mega-prison CECOT, for example.
“I would do that to people that hit old ladies over the head with a baseball bat,” Trump said. “People that push people into subway trains just before the train is ready to stop. … People that shoot people in the back, people that are executioners.”
To date, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of illegals to El Salvador, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was in the country illegally and identified by federal law enforcement as a member of the MS-13 gang.
Abrego Garcia, however, is not at CECOT. He was transferred to a lesser facility in Santa Ana, El Salvador, nearly two weeks before Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., made the first of multiple trips by Democrat lawmakers to plead for his release.
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